It is commonly accepted in the academy that developing a critical thinking capacity and related capabilities will make students more effective thinkers and writers, and that these are desirable traits for graduates to have no matter what path they take after graduation. While most academics agree that critical thinking is an essential component of…

This article gives an account of creating and delivering a (trans)disciplinary writing-intensive course focused on translation and translingual writing. The course, offered in a comparative literature program at a Canadian university, was co-created by an applied linguist, a literature professor, and a curriculum theorist, and was inspired in part…

This article describes an assessment project that analyzed syllabi approved for a communication intensive (CI) requirement in a general education program. As such, it is a first step in a more comprehensive assessment. The article suggests that it is important to ensure that inputs are evaluated prior to an evaluation of outcomes. The assessment…

In fall 2010, the University of Massachusetts Amherst instituted a new upper-division General Education requirement, the Integrative Experience (IE), designed to help students integrate the various components of their undergraduate experience and reflect upon their learning and development as a result of those experiences, both key dimensions of…

This essay argues that what might otherwise be considered "plagiarism" in student writing is a symptom of the difficulties students encounter in their reading and writing, moments in which students' inabilities to critically assess, read, and respond to sources through the act of writing come to the surface. Expanding the context within…

Starting from the premise that good writing requires sound thinking, this paper presents a workable process for developing and using writing assignments as thinking and learning tools within a historical and philosophical context. Though presented from the perspective of a chemist, this process is actually general in nature and links writing…

A reading-writing initiative began in 2011-12 at the University of Toronto as a partnership between an East Asian Studies (EAS) department and an English Language Learning (ELL) Program. In this institution, students are expected to enter into scholarly discussions in their first year essays, yet many (both native English speakers and non-native…

Carter (2007) identifies four meta-genres associated with writing activities that can help students learn discipline-specific writing skills relative to standards within a given field: these include problem solving, empirical approaches to analysis, selection of sources to use within research, and production of materials that meet accepted…

Implementation of communication-across-the-curriculum initiatives has outpaced their systematic assessment, leaving many stakeholders wondering whether faculty and students are benefiting from the emphasis on writing, speaking, and other communicative media in discipline-based courses and curricula. Increasing interest in assessment, however, has…

This article describes a model for student/faculty collaboration in WAC development--students tutoring faculty on drafts of the writing assignments they have designed for their own students. While writing center scholarship is student-centered and invites student participation, Writing Across the Curriculum scholarship and implementation remains…

Peter Beidler reflects in this essay upon his experiences with his first year students following the events of 9-11. When the class met, still numb with the horror of events, Beidler and his apprentice teacher devised a different kind of exercise for the class. Having taken fifteen minutes to talk about the attacks with students, the author passed…

This essay reflects on the ways in which the events of 9-11 offered those in the humanities an opportunity to demonstrate the many and varied gifts the disciplines have to offer a postmodern world that, for all its technological wonder, is still, ultimately, utterly dependent on food for the soul--the sort of nourishment that the liberal arts…

Both curricular reformers and writing specialists believe a connection exists between critical thinking and writing, however two obstacles have prevented any conclusion from emerging. One is that there is no established shared understanding of what "critical thinking" means. The other is that no one knows how to measure it, even though…